Today 16 April, 2 pm Eastern: Google+ Hangout on Government Role in Free Access to Legal Information

A Google+ hangout on the topic of The Government Role in Free Access to Legal Information, will take place today, 16 April 2013, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern ( -4:00 p.m. UTC), and will be hosted by Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack.

Click here for video of the hangout.

The Twitter hashtag for the hangout appears to have been #freelaw

Click here for archived tweets from the hangout, in .csv format.

The URL for the hangout will be announced shortly on the LII Twitter feed, @LIICornell, and on the LII Google+ feed.

HT @LIICornell

Strause et al.: How Federal Statutes Are Named, and the Yale Database of Federal Statute Names

Renata E.B. Strause of Yale Law School, and colleagues, have published How Federal Statutes Are Named, Law Library Journal, 105, 7-30 (2013).

Here is a summary of the article:

The naming of [U.S.] federal statutes for individuals has received surprisingly little systematic attention. The purposes of this article are to trace the history of federal statutory naming conventions and to identify as authoritatively and as completely as possible the persons and political issues Congress has decided to honor or highlight in this fashion, as well as the proliferation of abbreviations as a further shortening of the short title.

In their research the authors used the Yale Law School Library’s Database of Federal Statute Names.

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library told us that, according to Strause et al. (2013), page 12, a key source of data for the Database of Federal Statute Names was the U.S. House of Representatives’ Office of the Law Revision Counsel’s Table of Popular Names (HT also Thom Neale of the Sunlight Foundation).

Other sources of popular name data for U.S. federal statutes include:

• The Legal Information Institute’s Table of Popular Names, developed by LII Director Tom Bruce
• the united states GitHub repository’s Bill Nicknames database, created by Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation
• THOMAS’s List of Bill Popular and Short Titles (HT Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation)
• Professor Richard Leiter of the University of Nebraska and Adrian White‘s Concordance of Federal Legislation (HT Richard Leiter)

Stephane Cottin of Secrétariat général du Gouvernement and ADIJ tells us that Legifrance publishes a similar list of popular names for French statutes, the Lois Dites….

The Yale Database of Federal Statute Names includes the following fields:

• Popular Name Statutized?:
• Type:
• Date Enacted:
• Short Title:
• Public Law citation:
• Statute At Large citation:
• Named For?:
• Link/Source:
• Notes:

According to Jason, the library does not currently provide an API or bulk access to the database, but is considering providing them in the future.

HT @maricheney and @jeiseman here and here, and the members of the Legal Informatics Research Network

Legal Information Institute Is Hiring a Software Developer

The Legal Information Institute announced today that it is hiring a software developer. Here is an excerpt from the informal description:

We’re looking for a software developer who can help us build out our collections into the world of Linked Data. We intend to offer both user-facing services that leverage Semantic Web techniques, and back-end services that will allow others to power their applications with LII technology. We would like you to be familiar with a variety of text-processing techniques including XML and XML tools such as xQuery and the eXist database server, RDF, SPARQL, and native RDF stores such as AllegroGraph and Jena, standards like SKOS. [...]

Click here for the complete announcement.

Click here for the formal job description.

Click here for the LII Website.

HT @emasters.

URN:LEX: New Version Available

A new version of the URN:LEX standard for legal identifiers has been posted. The new version is dated 2 April 2010, and expires 4 October 2010.

The new version has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA); Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII).

The contacts for the draft are Professor Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA.

According to the new version, “The purpose of the ‘lex’ namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law.”

Here are some key differences between the new version and the previous version (dated 30 October 2009):

• The former term “National Registrar” has been changed to “Registrar” because that role may pertain to jurisdictions other than national jurisdictions;
• A new “Definitions” section has been added, providing definitions for the terms “Source of Law” and “Registrar”;
• The definition of “Source of Law” provides that that term denotes “anything that can be conceived of as the originator of legal rules,” presumably including constitutions; treaties and other international agreements; contracts; conveyancing instruments; and proposed legislation. Further, other parts of the new version expressly refer to:
• constitutions (see, e.g., the example of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution in section 4.4),
• treaties (see, e.g., section 4.5),
• proposed legislation (see, e.g., the example of a proposition from the Sénat de France in Section 4.4), and
• conveyancing instruments (see, e.g., the example of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License in Section 4.4);
• The element formerly named “country” is now named “jurisdiction”, because that element may refer to national or international jurisdictions;
• The syntax of the “partition-id” element has been changed, such that the former character “#” has been replaced by “~”, in order to avoid resolution and retrieval problems arising from the fact that when a URN is resolved, a “#” character in the URN will not be transmitted to the server.

Full disclosure: I submitted comments respecting proposed revisions to the former version of URN:LEX, and some of my comments were incorporated into the new version. I am most grateful to Professor Francesconi and his colleagues for considering the comments offered and for incorporating many of those comments into the new version.

URN:LEX is one of the metadata standards being used in conjunction with the Law.gov legal open government data project.

Legal information systems developers are sharing examples of URN:LEX identifiers, and discussing how to use URN:LEX, on LexCraft, the wiki for sharing best practices in legal information systems development, hosted by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School. To participate in this discussion, or to add further examples, if you’re not already a LexCraft member, one need only register as a LexCraft member. Registration is free. Click here to register on LexCraft.

HT Professor Enrico Francesconi.

URN:LEX Illustrative Examples: US Law

Several examples of how the URN:LEX legal identifier standard can be applied to US legal documents, have been posted on LexCraft, the wiki for sharing best practices in legal information systems development, hosted by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School.

URN:LEX is one of the legal metadata standards proposed to be used in the Law.gov legal open government data project.

The URN:LEX examples available so far on LexCraft cover:

• U.S. federal statutes, regulations, and case law;
• U.S. state statutes and case law; and
• U.S. municipal ordinances.

Further, a discussion of the use of URN:LEX is now taking place on LexCraft.

To participate in this discussion, or to add further examples, if you’re not already a LexCraft member, one need only register as a LexCraft member. Registration is free. Click here to register on LexCraft.

Click here for more information about URN:LEX.

Click here for more information about LexCraft.

Click here for more information about Law.gov.

CALI Taxonomy Being Marked Up in RDF Linked Data

The legal taxonomy of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (the CALI Taxonomy) is being marked up in RDF as Linked Data, in a cooperative effort between CALI, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII), and the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections, according to Tom Bruce, Director of the LII, and John Joergensen, creator of the Rutgers Camden Digital Collections.

The CALI announcement is the second recent Linked Data announcement relevant to to the legal community. Earlier this month the Library of Congress (LC) announced that in 2010 it will publish a Linked Data version of the LC Name Authority File, which contains thousands of names of government agencies from the U.S., the U.K., and many other jurisdictions, as well as names of thousands of law-related individuals.

The CALI Taxonomy and the LC Name Authority File will join several other law-related authority files, including the LC Subject Headings, which are available as Linked Data. (Law-related subject authority files are commonly referred to as legal ontologies.)

These Linked Data authority files can be integrated with full text collections of legal resources — such as those of the legal information institutes or digital law libraries — or with collections of legal metadata — such as those of the legal scholarly repositories — to render the meaning, or semantic level, of the names and subject content in those resources intelligible to machines.

As Dr. Adam Wyner of University College London explains in his recent articles on legal ontologies and XML for legal documents, this rendering of the semantic level of legal information processable by machines is what is generally meant by the phrase “the legal Semantic Web.”

URN:LEX : A Uniform Resource Name Namespace for Sources of Law

An Internet-Draft of URN:LEX : A Uniform Resource Name Namespace for Sources of Law, has been published by Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council (ITTIG/CNR); Italy, National Centre for ICT in Public Administration (CNIPA); Brazil, Federal Senate, IT Department (PRODASEN); and Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (LII). The contacts for the draft are Professor Enrico Francesconi & Pierluigi Spinosa, both of ITTIG/CNR, and Caterina Lupo of CNIPA. Here is a description of the draft standard:

“The purpose of the ‘lex’ namespace is to assign an unequivocal identifier, in standard format, to documents that are sources of law. The identifier is conceived so that its construction depends only on the characteristics of the document itself and is, therefore, independent from the document’s on-line availability, its physical location, and access mode. ‘Sources of law’ include any legal document within the domain of legislation (including bills), case law and administrative acts or regulations. This identifier will be used as a way to represent the references (and more generally, any type of relation) among the various sources of law. In an on-line environment with resources distributed among different Web publishers, uniform resource names allow simplified global interconnection of legal documents by means of automated hypertext linking.”

Regulation Room Beta Test at Cornell

From November 9 through November 22, 2009, a beta test is being held of Regulation Room, “a pilot project,” sponsored by the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI) and hosted by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), “that provides an online environment for people and groups to learn about, discuss, and react to selected rules (regulations) proposed by [U.S.] federal agencies.”

During the beta test, “users can read and respond to daily ‘Have Your Say Posts’” about “a proposed National Highway Transportation Safety Administration rule: Tire Efficiency Consumer Information Program.” “They can also ‘Dig In’ to specific issues in the rule and comment on particular aspects of the agency’s reasoning.” “During the week of Nov. 23, the CERI research team will post a summary of the discussion. Users will then be able to react to that summary.”

HT Georgetown Law Library Blog.

Professor Bruce Shows the Value of Free Access to Law

Professor Tom Bruce, Director of Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute (LII), this week has powerfully demonstrated the value of free access to law. He gives a detailed account of the matter here. Here is a summary (Tom, please correct me if I get any of this wrong.):

According to press reports, Joe Arpaio, Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, USA, recently asserted that he had legal authority, under U.S. federal law, to apprehend individuals considered to be undocumented immigrants to the United States. To support this assertion, the press reports state, the sheriff cited what he represented as a U.S. federal statute, which, he asserted, he had discovered in the LII’s version of the U.S. Code. Unfortunately for the sheriff, as the press reports relate, this assertion turned out to be inconsistent with the truth: the “statute” that the sheriff had reportedly cited is not a U.S. federal law, nor a law of any other jurisdiction: it seems to be a work of fiction, apparently created by an anti-immigrant political activist organization.

Yet, according to news reports, because the LII publishes a current, freely available version of the U.S. Code on its Website, many individuals who learned of the sheriff’s assertions were able to use the LII’s version of the Code to investigate the sheriff’s assertions and to determine that the sheriff’s representation of the law was inaccurate.

Preventing government officials from misrepresenting the law, by giving citizens free public access to the law, is arguably among the most powerful justifications for the free access to law movement, and for continued support for the legal information institutes.

Congratulations to Professor Bruce and the LII team, and to the other members of the free access to law movement, for providing to people throughout the world the vital benefit of access to the laws that govern them.

Cornell Digital Law Library Meeting

During the week of October 13, 2009, a very rewarding informal meeting of digital law library developers, administrators, and researchers took place at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. The gathering was graciously hosted by Dr. Tom Bruce. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a number of issues respecting free access to law, legal information institutes, and digital law libraries. Photos of the meeting are available here and here. Among the participants were:

• Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CANLII & LexUM Laboratory;
• Marc-André Morissette, Chief Analyst at LexUM Laboratory;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Head of Products and Business Development at LexUM Laboratory and a Ph.D. student at University of Montreal Faculté de Droit, studying the effects on legal systems of free access to law & legal information institutes;
• Daniel Shane, Software Developer at LexUM Laboratory;
• Elmer Masters, Director of Internet Development at CALI;
• John Joergensen, Reference & Circulation Librarian at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library, and developer of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections;
• Stuart Sierra, Assistant Director of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School and developer of AltLaw: The Free Legal Search Engine; and
• Sara Frug, Brian Hughes, Daniel Nagy, & David Shetland of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

On October 14-15, the following topics were discussed:

• Professor Poulin, Marc-André Morissette, Pierre-Paul Lemyre, & Daniel Shane discussed information acquisitions, text-processing methods, the treatment of images in court decisions, and administrative matters, respecting CANLII;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, & Sara Frug of Cornell’s LII, & Elmer Masters of CALI discussed their use of Drupal to present a variety of types of content, their text processing methods, and the costs and benefits of cloud computing;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, Elmer Masters, and Tim Stanley & Nicolas Moline of Justia discussed using OpenID & OAuth to enable streamlined authentication & access to online legal resources;
• Dr. Bruce, Professor Poulin, and others discussed various methods of legal metadata standardization, including encouraging courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies to adopt publishing standards, and the development and promotion of OAI4Courts as a means of standardizing metadata for court documents, to enable sharing and aggregation of such metadata in open repositories;
• Stuart Sierra described his methods for automated acquisition of US Federal Court decisions, as well as his text processing and data management techniques at AltLaw;
• John Joergensen described his methods for automated acquisition of court decisions, text processing, procedures for digitizing print and microfiche legal documents, and digital preservation techniques, at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library’s digital collections.

On October 16, the following topics were discussed:

• Prof. Poulin discussed the former challenges of adding secondary sources to CANLII, the new possibilities of adding commentary and user generated content to CANLII, and his desire that CANLII be a generative system, in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s sense of that term in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It;
• Dr. Bruce, Prof. Poulin, Elmer Masters, and all the participants discussed their plans for sustaining innovation in the coming years at LII, CANLII, & CALI, and for developing business models and strategies;
• Dr. Bruce emphasized the need to develop standards to enable sharing of metadata and legal information objects among digital repositories, and to educate reporters of decisions about the need to enable information sharing in legal digital publishing;
• The LexUM team discussed two different approaches to taxonomies that they have tested respecting CANLII;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre demonstrated several LexUM Web 2.0 projects, including Le Code civil du Quebéc annoté, which allows users to add annotations, and the CANLEX set of APIs for CANLII, including the RefLex API, which hotlinks legal citations in a user’s document. Prof. Poulin & Pierre-Paul also discussed Lexacto, a search engine enabling practitioners to index and retrieve content on particular legal topics, whether that content is located within or outside their firm. Some of this new technology will be tested at the Supreme Court of Canada;
• Marc-André Morissette demonstrated a drop-down table of contents-based document management system for legislative materials, called LexView, with the Canadian Criminal Code as a prototype. He said that similar technology would be applied to the Nova Scotia Annotated Civil Procedure Rules and continuing legal education materials for British Columbia;
• Dr. Bruce, Elmer Masters, John Joergensen, and the Cornell LII team discussed implementation of OpenID, the possible sharing of taxonomies, and possible collaboration respecting data for updating the U.S. Code;
• In a wrap-up discussion, each participant identified the most valuable information they acquired during the meeting. John Joergensen initiated a new discussion about the need for the legal information institutes to consider new issues in light of the institutes’ maturation and acceptance as key actors in the legal information infrastructure, and underscored digital preservation as one such issue. Dr. Bruce & Prof. Poulin reflected on their careers leading legal information institutes and how their personal roles had changed as their organizations had grown and matured.
• The participants agreed to meet again next autumn, either in Ithaca or in Montreal. Everyone thanked Dr. Bruce and the Cornell LII team for their gracious hospitality.

Many thanks to Dr. Bruce & his team for their gracious hospitality and stimulating discussion.